Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 6

THE HARTFORD COURANT: Monday, Dacambar 20, 1993 A7 Russian nationalist thrives on shock talk A6 THE HARTFORD COURANT: Monday, Dacambar 20, 1993 Irish leader warns IRA on violence Indian pilgrims gather at statue for rare ritual IT'S A WISH. IT'S FULFILLMENT. IT'S NOW. IT'S FOREVER. IT'S HOT.

IT'S GOLD. i I i 5 i I. lV- A i a lis Nothing Makes You Feel As Good As Cold. ByLEEHOCKSTADER Washington Post MOSCOW "Political impo-; tence is finished!" Vladimir Zhirin-- ovsky rasped at a polling station last week as he cast his vote in Russia's legislative elections. "Today is the beginning of or-' gasm.

The whole nation, I promise you, will feel orgasm next year!" As a campaign promise, it was only slightly more extravagant than all the others Zhirinovsky had been throwing around on his way to the elections, in which his ultranation-alist party's strong showing astonished Russia and the world. Clownish, bizarre and calculated to shock, it was the kind of remark that had led Zhirinovsky's opponents to ignore him as an electoral threat. Today, Zhirinovsky, 47, is being taken seriously as the embodiment of a strain of Russian nationalism that mourns the loss of the Soviet empire and feels the country's move toward Western-style capitalism has only brought disaster and humiliation. Yet his speeches and public remarks are noteworthy not only for their nostalgia for imperialism and their xenophobic rage, but also for their abundant contradictions, glaring illogic and sheer outra-geousness. For Zhirinovsky, words and promises are malleable things, far less important for their meaning than for the sensations they create, the emotions they stir and the votes they elicit.

Behind them, the man himself, his personal history, and even the sources of his material support remain shrouded by conflicting accounts. He wants Russia to take over enormous swaths of territory in rope and, especially, Asia, in a "last linking Zhirinovsky to the KGB. There has been further speculation about Zhirinovsky's connections and the sources of his support in recent weeks. Some Russian journalists have suggested the money came from Saddam Hussein, with whom Zhirfnovsky met last year in Baghdad. He has denied it.

He has depicted his misnamed Liberal Democratic Party as a mass movement, but it seems much closer to a one-man band. The only other widely known person associated with the party is Anatoly Kash-pirovsky, a television faith healer who was wildly popular three years ago but now spends much of his time abroad. Zhirinovsky was educated in Moscow at the prestigious Institute of Asia and Africa and became a lawyer. But his real occupation after finishing his studies is the subject of some mystery and speculation. Before entering politics as a founder of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1990, he spent 15 years working in government agencies legislating social matters, he told the Wall Street Journal in 1992.

He spent a few years on the staff of the Soviet Peace Committee, another KGB front group, in the early 1970s. He has rejected the label of fascist that many of his opponents have used to describe him. But his own words lead his opponents to insist that the label fits. "When I come to power, there will be a dictatorship, he said in late 1991. "I will beat the Americans in space.

I will surround the planet with our space stations so they'll be scared of our space weapons. I don't care if they call me a fascist or a Nazi. There's nothing like fear to make people work better. The stick, not the carrot." Many Jewish activists here say they have long regarded Zhirinovsky as Jewish. But his rhetoric is laced with barely veiled anti-Semitic remarks.

And at his press conference Tuesday, he denied emphatically that he has any Jewish blood. The links with Jewish groups, first reported this week by the New York Times, were confirmed by Ye-vegeny Satanovsky, director of Moscow's Jewish Information Agency. Satanovsky said in an interview that Zhirinovsky was active in the Shalom Center, an organization set up in the late 1980s by a KGB front group known as the Anti-Zionist Committee. He said Zhirinovsky's name was listed on the Shalom Center's board of directors along with those of prominent Jewish leaders. The KGB created the Anti-Zionist Committee to counterbalance independent Jewish organizations that were springing up at the time, Satanovsky said.

Zhirinovsky's reported involvement in Jewish organizations linked to the KGB is only one of many indications that he was involved with the former Soviet intelligence service, part of which has become the Russian Security Ministry. When he had a falling out with a dissident faction of his Liberal Democratic Party in late 1990, his opponents in the party accused him of KGB connections. Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian journalist who has published a book on the KGB, said she was told by a source in the agency's ideological counterintelligence branch that Zhirinovsky was a KGB agent. The KGB source "told me that he had been recruited long ago," Albats said. She added, however, that there are no known, public documents i 's 1 1 ,4 stream of milk cloaked Bahubali in white.

Then came sandalwood pastes and herbal mixtures and their vivid hues of yellow, red and purple. The ceremony was carried on television and radio throughout the. country. The United News of India reported that turnout at the site 100 miles west of Bangalore topped 350,000, with chair bearers earning $3 to carry the aged and infirm to vantage points atop surrounding hills. "The great spectacle left the devotees spellbound," UNI said.

But most pilgrims had to stand far away on the Chandragiri hills, it added, and special scaffolding erected around the statue impaired their view. Police chased away hundreds of people when they tried to climb In-dragiri hill, site of the statue, for a better look. It was the Jain faith that inspired Mohandas K. Gandhi, spiritual father of India's independence the ideals of nonviolence and the fast-unto-death. The Jains' central doctrine is that all of nature is alive, even stones, and their prohibition against destroying life is so complete that devout followers wear masks to guard against inhaling insects or invisible organisms.

Jain cleric Charukerty Bhattar-aka, who supervised Sunday's ceremony, said the message he wanted to get across to his country, where in the past decade Sikh, Muslim and Hindu have often been at odds, was the message of Bahubali: "Happiness through nonviolence, peace through renunciation." Los Angeles Times NEW DELHI Hundreds of thousands of Indian pilgrims converged on a towering statue of granite Sunday to watch its anointment with milk, sugar-cane juice and sandalwood paste. For believers in the Jain religion, it was the last chance this century to participate in the sacred ceremony, held once every 12 years at the conjunction of heavenly bodies. For public figures, including Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, the ritual in the hills of southern India's Karnataka state was a sterling occasion to remind citizens that India's various faiths can enrich as well as divide. "I have come to Lord Bahubali who is a symbol of sacrifice to gain inspiration," Rao, a Hindu, said after helicoptering in to visit the site Saturday.

The serenely smiling statue of the naked Jain ascetic at Shravanabela-gola is 57 feet tall, and is said to be the largest free-standing monolithic statue in the world. As devotees sang and chanted fervently from Jain scriptures, holy water from 1,008 pots was poured over the gray colossus Sunday. Believers had to bid to give the graven image of Bahubali its ritual bath with water drawn from a sacred tank nearby and from sites throughout India. The honor of pouring the first pot went to Sudheer Jain, son of a New Delhi paper merchant who offered almost $50,000 for the honor. Hundreds of quarts of sugar-cane juice then were poured on the statue, turning it light green.

A gushing Associated Press LONDON Ireland will order tougher measures against the IRA if the outlawed group rejects a British-Irish peace plan and resumes full-scale violence, the republic's prime minister warned Sunday. Within hours of Prime Minister Albert Reynolds' remarks, the Irish Republican Army triggered its first major bomb since the British-Irish peace offer. The blast in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, narrowly missed a passing army patrol and a civilian car carrying two adults and three children. There were no injuries, but police said the five people in the car were treated for shock at a hospital after the 500-pound bomb exploded. Also Sunday, suspected IRA warnings of bombs in London railway and subway stations brought hundreds of trains to a halt.

A daylong search on about 20 miles of track turned up no bombs, police said. Reynolds and John Major, Britain's prime minister, Wednesday agreed on principles aimed at bringing peace to British-ruled Northern Ireland after 25 years of violence. They offered Sinn Fein, the IRA's political allies, a place in negotiations if the IRA stopped killing. "If they say no undoubtedly there will be a stiffer security situation," Reynolds said in an interview Sunday with the British Broadcasting Corp. "Both governments would be expected to respond," he added.

Reynolds indicated that the British and Irish governments may re ward the Irish Republican Army with amnesties for jailed members if the IRA joins in peace talks on Northern Ireland. Ireland also would lift a ban on broadcast interviews with the members of the IRA and Sinn Fein, he said. Reynolds did not say what he would do if the IRA rejects the plan. One step would be to clamp down on IRA members who operate from the Republic of Ireland. The Catholic-based IRA has used violence to end British rule in Northern Ireland, which then could join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland.

Major reiterated that London would not abandon the province's pro-British Protestant majority, but would support their right to remain British. "Joint British-Irish authority was not suggested," Major wrote in Sunday Lire, a newspaper in the Northern Ireland capital Belfast, in a front-page appeal to Northern Ireland's 1.56 million residents. IRA commanders reportedly started talks during the weekend about the Major-Reynolds plan. The plan provides for the IRA and Sinn Fein to join exploratory talks with the British and Irish governments and other Northern Ireland parties within three months of declaring a cease-fire. The British-Irish declaration envisioned a united Ireland, but said Northern Ireland's Protestants would have to agree.

Sinn Fein said it would talk to Protestant and Catholic church leaders, who back the plan. But Vladimir Zhirinovsky Being taken seriously thrust south" to warm waters that would realize the country's "great historic mission." But he says no Russian blood need be shed in the even though America, Iran, urkey and Afghanistan might not like the Russian expansion. "This is just a solution to the world's problems," he wrote. He speaks fondly of respecting human rights and building a civil society, but he has also pledged to eject non-Russian minorities from Russia and to execute criminals in a manner that suggests little regard for due process. He has called Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and his ideas "not that bad." He has been linked to Russian Jewish advocacy organizations active in Moscow in the late-1 980s and acknowledged this week that his father's given name, Volf, is "not very familiar to a Russian ear." Tjsjjjl gjyy' Associated Press A British soldier takes a position ntar a window decorated with Santa Claus as he covers comrades conducting a search Sunday in Belfast, Nothem Ireland.

i JEWELERS WOl IMU COMOCTICtSTatXTMAU DAMUHr'AMMAU MfMOtNSOUAAi 10UTVXr IA2A TWUMMJU HMAMW WffWUMAU, QULK0O MANOMTM MWHAAN TOPMNQTON WATWUffT Wtftaa CaraAAWAwancs bays Democratic and Labor Party leader. The Social Democratic and Labor Party wants Irish unity but opposes IRA violence, and attracts twice as many votes from the province's Catholics as Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, writing in Dublin's Sunday Tribune, said it was up to Britain to persuade the Protestants to go along. Adams met Sunday with John Hume, the Catholic-based Social I 1 1 -m w.v -j- Mm -mm: mm x. 1 JiHISfl.J Ifcl II 11 II II II II 1 III I SlfltiW II VI 1 II VllT i.

i Hi a it-jt-i 1 tv i Ji ll' 1 6 -Z' ilfillF fi'i T7" fV I is I ,1 1 1 1 JA I I jar i- i is 111 Si mi WSm FIT j. 'MBM UmulrJAL irll 4 1 1 imwm i 'si' I 'X-'if( h'H i I I I I i i I Denim jeans, every which Vrap up their favorite style and let (hem celebrate the season in I I J-1 1 a I CHILDREN'S LEVrSPORTSWltAIT 20aQFF 7 j'; "--K' uvA 5- -r: Suva ftsrour AueruHnu Inw nrlead Levi's anri Little Levi's leans. I 'j 7 Jackets nd tops for Infants, Toddle s'. 2-4, Girls' 4-6X, 7-14 and 1 Boys' 4 Reg. 1 0.99-29.99, SALE 1 .79.23.99 i and Boy' 9-20 Jcw D.

3676851 SM alt ttort Salt end Friday, Dacttniw 24, 1993. Young Mtn't, MImm', JunW Regular original prict art offarlng prteaa ontyp may or may not hav rutti In aala. JUIORS'LEVI'SJEANS MISSSS' LEVI'S JEANS envc i rvi .19 ku .1 iJvarllMl marchandlia may ba avallaonnpan prtcaa In upcoming vnt. YOUNG MEN'S LEVI'S JEANS SALE 31.99 SAVE ur cnllAction includes 4 I SAVS 3 Surprise her with 512 Slim Fit, SAVE $3 Nor most flattering 5-pocket 550 Relaxed Fit, SCO Loose Fit and fen oon in 1 RlmeJ ft and 525 Boot Cut. In short, medium and long.

521 Tapered t. In a variety of the SAVE $5 Choose from 550 Relaxed Fit, 560 Loose Fit or 505 Original Fit. In a variety of stonewash, bleach or black finishes. Waist 2W0. Reg.

36.99 550 Relaxed Fit and 560 Loose Fit. Choose bleach, stonewash or black. Sizes 8-14, waists 26-30. Reg. 29.93 stone, bleach, black or white, Reg.

39.99 finishe. Reg. 39.99 i. u.ii 'i V'v fci'if fe. i I Chargaftt IVe aso tvecome MasterCard and Visa SPECIAL HOLIDAY HOlir.S TODAY, ALL STORES OPCtl CAM-1 1 PU i..